Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing?

For investors in Boo.com, WebVan and eToys, the bursting of the dotcom bubble came as a bit of a shock.

Companies like this raised vast sums on the promise that the worldwide web would change everything. Then, in the spring of 2000, stock markets collapsed.

Some economists had long been sceptical about the promise of computers. In 1987, we didn’t have the web, but spreadsheets and databases were appearing in every workplace – and having, it seemed, no impact whatsoever.

1) Nick Carr uses the centralization of electricity production in the early 1900’s to explain why Cloud Computing is going to dominate. He does this in his book IT Doesn’t Matter. How long has Cloud computing been around, and has it taken a long time to be adopted?